In this path-breaking new work, Gregory Jusdanis asks why literature matters. Why are we afraid to admit our pleasures of reading, to defend the arts to the school board, to discuss the importance of literature in life? Drawing on a wealth of references from Aristophanes to Eudora Welty, from Fernando Pessoa to Orhan Pamuk, from Cavafy to hypertext stories, Jusdanis reminds us that the arts have always been under attack. Instead of despair, however, he offers a pragmatic defense of literature, arguing that it performs a social function in dramatizing the break between illusion and reality, life and the life-like, permanence and metamorphosis. The ability to distinguish between the actual and the imaginary is essential to human beings. Our capacity to imagine something new, to project ourselves into the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world is based on this distinction. Literature allows us to imagine alternate possibilities of human relationships and political institutions, even in the watery world of the Internet. At once daring and lucid, Fiction Agonistes considers the place of art today with passion and optimism.

"[Jusdanis] displays a wonderfully encyclopedic knowledge of criticism and literature from the ancient Greeks to contemporary postmodern and post-structuralist writers . . . Jusdanis has laid forth a provocative and interesting reflection on the current state of literature and its place in the world . . . [F]or anyone interested in the art of letters, [Fiction Agonistes is] a worthwhile read." - Global Comment

"Fiction Agonistes is a formidable work: wide-ranging, erudite, and incisive in its entire range of argument. It represents a powerful effort to think through the issues that have surrounded the academic debate about the study of literature and to arrive at a full understanding of its centrality to the institutional processes of human life, and most especially to the reflective consciousness upon which any form of civilized life must depend." - Harvard University

"I read Fiction Agonistes with a sense of excitement and deep pleasure. Here is a critic engaged with issues of importance to any thinking person. Gregory Jusdanis asks hard questions: Does literature matter? If so, why? He reaches back to the Greeks (and others, such as Kant and Schiller) to find answers, and they are thrilling ones. Art, broadly defined, attends those boundaries between real and the imagined worlds, between matter and mind, body and soul. Our imagined worlds profoundly affect our real ones, affording opportunities to change realities in significant ways. Indeed, art—literature, in particular—enables social transformation itself. This is a wide-ranging and engaging study that strikes countless sparks, and I cannot imagine a more useful or important book for our times." - poet, novelist, critic, and author of Why Poetry Matters (2008)

"This is a wide-ranging and engaging study that strikes countless sparks, and I cannot imagine a more useful or important book for our times. Jusdanis asks hard questions: Does literature matter? If so, why? He reaches back to the Greeks (and others, such as Kant and Schiller) to find answers, and they are thrilling ones. Art attends those boundaries between real and imagined, matter and mind, body and soul. Our imagined worlds profoundly affect our real ones, affording opportunities to change realities in significant ways. Indeed, art—literature, in particular—enables social transformation itself." - poet, novelist, critic, and author of Why Poetry Matters (2008)